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Bosch Advanced Ceramics and Lithoz
Bosch Advanced Ceramics: Driving ceramic Additive Manufacturing for series production with Lithoz If you were looking to build a ‘dream-team’ to drive the series production capabilities of ceramic Additive Manufacturing, there’s a good chance that Bosch Advanced Ceramics and Lithoz would be high on your list. Both are pioneers in their respective fields: Bosch, a global multinational and in many ways the original Ceramic Injection Moulding company, and Lithoz, a ‘startup that has grown up’ and is now a global leader in ceramic AM machines. PIM International’s Nick Williams tells the story of their cooperation and their mission to use ceramic AM for series production.
The production of technical ceramic components has a long history at Robert Bosch GmbH, one of Germany’s industrial giants and a widely recognised name throughout the world thanks to its automotive heritage and leading position in the consumer goods and power tools sectors. The mass production of Bosch’s groundbreaking ceramic spark plug bodies for the automotive industry began at the start of the 20th century and, in 1939, the company registered its first patent for an early version of Ceramic Injection Moulding (CIM). Today, technical ceramic component manufacturing at Bosch continues apace. In 2016, various operations were brought under the umbrella of Bosch Advanced Ceramics, a new agile organisation that was created as a corporate startup within Bosch Group. Here, existing expertise in technical ceramics production, primarily by CIM, powder compaction and green machining, is used to help drive forward the advancement of the next generation of ceramic processing technology: Additive Manufacturing.
Vol. 15 No. 1 © 2021 Inovar Communications Ltd
Bosch is, of course, also a major producer of metal injection moulded components. Both its MIM and CIM expertise were developed at the company’s manufacturing plant in Immenstadt, Southern Germany, which is now home to Bosch Advanced Ceramics (Fig. 1). Just as
Bosch’s expertise in plastic injection moulding furthered the past development of MIM and CIM production, a philosophy of leveraging its existing expertise in materials and process technologies continues as Bosch Advanced Ceramics drives forward its ceramic AM capabilities.
Fig. 1 A view inside the state of the art Powder Injection Moulding facility at Bosch Advanced Ceramics (Courtesy Bosch Advanced Ceramics)
March 2021 Powder Injection Moulding International
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